Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

In any event, being in the Americas [ sic ] Best Value Inn in Maumee with your sleep-apnea mask and tank and your bite guard (it inhibits the grinding and clenching) and your prescription for habit-forming sleep medication and your spouse with the chthonic snoring for the wedding of your niece when the two of you were once a tangle of limbs is the closest to a cessation of biological function that you can get on an overnight without actually being in a state of total cessation, and what could be more tender than this? What is more tender than the recognition that you have changed, that you have come to a point where you are not what you once were? Your former state is now sandblasted, as abraded as anything else could be by the ravages of time. What is more tender than mutual recognition of failure? What is more truthful than the acknowledgment that what was once mutual is now solitary and atomized? What is more exact than the distance between you now? What is more perceptible than your awareness that you cannot do what you once so wanted to do, namely, be in love? Why is the fact that sleep is closest to death so much more factual when it is considered in the theater of connubial relations? Who are the two of you? Where will you go next? After Maumee? Why are you always staying at two-star hotels? How are you going to get through this wedding? ★★ (Posted 7/13/2013)

The Davenport Hotel and Tower, 10 South Post Street, Spokane, Washington, April 4–7, 2011

We didn’t know much about Spokane except, in a general way, how to pronounce Spokane. We didn’t know about the waterfalls downtown, and the bridges. And we didn’t know that Spokane is surrounded by arresting countryside. The Pacific Northwest stuff: conifers, skeins of fog, snow on the peaks. We arrived at the Davenport just a couple months after the Martin Luther King Day attempted bombing in Spokane, and so the Davenport Hotel was incredibly empty. The Davenport, it’s accurate to say, is one of the most beautiful hotels in the Lower Forty-Eight. It may be one of the most beautiful hotels in the entire world. Were you to discount hotels that are constructed primarily to house sheikhs — hotels that will never house you or me — you would have to conclude that this was a truly remarkable place. There’s gilded everything inside, and potted palms, but it’s the ballrooms that are outrageous, and while we were staying there — Snowy Owl, as she was called on this trip, and I — you could just walk into these totally empty ballrooms (because how often in Spokane were the ballrooms in use?) and gape at their magnificence.

What I’m really driving at here is that the Davenport is the hotel where Snowy Owl and I began to collect our sequence of films of Snowy Owl running and dancing in public places and in extremely long hotel corridors. The bliss of dancing in a long hotel corridor (not that I have done it anywhere near as many times as Snowy Owl has) is to be found in the fact that you know you are showing up on someone’s camera somewhere. There is not a chance that at any moment you could be asked to discontinue it. There was a very long corridor in the Davenport, that is true, but it was nothing compared to its Hall of the Doges. I don’t really know what a doge is, some kind of magistrate in Venice, perhaps, but I do know that the name has the right kind of seriousness about it, and when we opened the door to the Hall of the Doges, K. was unable not to dance across it. K. was a dancer as a young person, and she can still jump pretty high, and even though she has a few injuries of the sort that a person is liable to have when approaching true middle age, she just threw her jacket, a hoodie of some kind, on the floor of the entirely empty Hall of the Doges and began dancing into the center of the room, irrepressibly. Did I know yet that this moment would describe everything we were going to be, the kind of people who would find it important to dance in hotels and especially to dance in hotels when otherwise besieged by the worst of circumstances?

So, as I say, here it was, just a couple of months after some cretin in Spokane had left a backpack with wires sticking out of it by the parade route on Martin Luther King Day, and we were just visiting the city as I attended a conference on social media in the motivational-speaking world, and I was failing to make any headway at the plenary session, failing to get any speaking offers, but we were, despite all of this, dancing in the Hall of the Doges. How long would they allow us to rehearse this dance? I personally know enough about Terpsichore to understand that diagonals are the most exciting shapes in a dance, how the dance starts at the back corner and moves forward toward the audience along diagonals, and I was an audience of one, and K. started from the back corner, and we had had our hard times, which I don’t need to enumerate here, but now we were here in the Hall of the Doges, and Snowy Owl was coming from that corner, on a diagonal, just like in one of those spectacular ballets where there is a princess and a frog, there is the history of the German peoples, or someone is a swan, and there are a dozen fifteen-year-olds whose toes are all bleeding as they do their extraordinary leaps, and it was all exactly like that, and I was worried about security coming to tell us that our stay was terminated in this hotel that was too good for us, but I was also worried about the dance ending, worried about the time after the dance, when the moment that had brought it about would begin to slip away. ★★★★★ (Posted 7/20/2013)

The question you want to ask about certain lodgings, even if they are newly constructed or newly renovated hotels primarily for alumni who happen to be visiting the campus, is whether sex in these hotels is somehow better than sex at home. There should be a way to test this, there should be a sex-related metric with which you could measure sex in hotels, especially the illicit variety, but of what would that metric consist? How about increments of remorse? Increments of remorse can be measured in hesitations of footfall. Increments of remorse are measured in la nausée . Are you more remorseful after sex at home or after sex at the hotel? Or are your orgasmic epiphanies more or less epiphanic? In certain women’s magazines, it is always possible to speak of mind-blowing orgasms, but never do these magazines advertise diminished remorse. Have less sexual remorse with him at home! Or is it only the male of the species who feels incremental postorgasmic remorse?

You are not the one at the conference. You are the one staying behind in the hotel room, logging too many hours watching ESPN, simply waiting, just waiting, for the time when a certain language arts instructor (back during a brief recidivist spell after a years-long break) will come up to the room and torture you a little bit, because you have not very much going on, except that you have left someone at home, and because of the increments of remorse, a certain amount of ordering-in of foods, especially ice cream, has taken place, despite the fact that any ordered-in foods are going on the credit card of the language arts instructor. You are fat, you are indolent, you are middle-aged, and you are tenuously employed. You are in this newly constructed hotel, and you are looking out at the shiny newly constructed veneer on the campus of George Mason University and thinking that a great many of your very best days are behind you now, which means that you are emotionally affected by commercials for Cialis. You are hoping that the sexual torture that will eventually ensue from the language arts instructor will be noteworthy for varieties of torture not yet experienced so that you will be distracted and your shame will be temporarily mitigated and your increments of remorse will be temporarily diminished by the hotel and the sexual torture and the oblivion.